Strange how even as bright an audience as the typical TE reader get such basic fundamentals wrong as supply, demand & price. It really is as simple as "More expensive food increases supply and decreases the large amount of wastage from harvest to mouth." Yield trend, peak farmland, animal vs plant consumption, and GM foods are all subplots to the total production and distribution of food according to peoples wants not needs.

Raising (or at least maintaining) yields in the face of rising energy costs and environmental challanges like climate change is critical to feeding the world and keeping food prices low and stable. However we need to be paying more attention to raising the productivity not just of land but also of labour and of fossil fuels, as use of fossil fuels become more expensive and/or constrained. High labour productivity is also challenged by costs of and constraints on fossil fuel use, but high labour productivity in agriculture is the foundation of emerging and high income economies - something we seldom seem to focus on in current debates. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919212001285

Growth in yields is correctly attributed to the "Green Revolution" which was the innovative improvement of yields in South America and India particularly by the work of Norman Borlaug. Surprisingly, this particular 'Green' is in opposition to environmentalist's version of 'Green' today.

Environmentalists convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw funding of Borlaug when he attempted to carry his work to Africa.

The mentioned study announcing Peak Agriculture sounds like a fake study lined up by those thought of as environmentalists today, who really want to block better use of the vast amount of under-used land in the United States, and probably many other places as well.

The article here correctly points out that the notion of Peak Agriculture assumes that yields will continue to increase, but that very assumed increase is being blocked, not enabled.

Caution in using genetically modified grains is appropriate, but this should be clearly distinguished from hybrid seed development which is a different kind of genetic control, which I believe was the approach of Borlaug.

Borlaug acknowledged a kind of environmentalists that were 'the salt of the earth', probably distinguishing the kind that did not cause his work to be canceled. He went on to point out that 'they' would think differently if they had lived with the poor people of the world as he had when doing his work. "Give us tractors, canals, and fertilizers," they would then say.

With tractors, canals, and fertilizers we might feed 10 billion. But then, there will be limits that will require a little more enlightened thinking.

We look to make tractors that will enable farm work that is more acceptable to people. That could be a part of how we get along up to the 10 billion point. See early development testing at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq5eIVVvdgA

I imagine we already produce more than enough calories, it is a problem of distribution - i.e. income distribution, more than anything else. I really don't think we would need to produce more food if the fatties just cut back on how much they eat - and spend on it.
See this weeks article on obesity for some obvious evidence. Or just look around you...

Perfect example of how to use good data and arrive at the wrong conclusions! Yield drops cannot be easily explained and Industrial agriculture may have no relevance to what needs to be done - Biological ecosystem is way to complex to be reduced to simplistic theories about how genetically modified seeds will improve yields. This seems more like a plug for Monsanto than an article written to analyse or discuss the problem.

We are not destroying our forests because we need space for people to live or because we want to use the wood.
We are destroying them because we need the land for agriculture and livestock and that's because demand for food is currently higher than the supply capacity.
And it's not simply a problem of distribution. Most food produced is actually being consumed. Some of it gets wasted, but waste is inevitable in such a complex logistics chain. I don't believe producers and food companies are happily throwing food away just for the sake of it. They'd be throwing money away and we know people don't usually do that.

But I agree with you that after we get production capacity in place, we would need to get money in the hands of those people, or else we would have idle capacity and hungry people at the same time - sort of the general problem many developed economies are facing right now: lots of idle capacity, workers unemployed, etc. and a lot of people who would like to be consuming more but who cannot do it because they don't have money. It's incredible how the lack of understanding of the monetary system can bring an otherwise healthy economy to its knees.

Absolutely the problem. Also, here in the US we farmers have the capital to invest in better drainage systems, modern irrigation systems, and other equipment. Most farmers in the developing world don't have this same advantage and the productivity of their land reflects it.

It's stupid to modify crops genetically in order to gain a few percentage points of efficiency but insist to keep employing "machines" that waste 90% of half the food we produce.
Estimates vary, but it takes between 5 and 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat.
If we stopped using animal products, we could feed the entire world population and revert lots of land to forest or wilderness.
But we are not that worried about feeding the poor, are we? We are much more worried about continuing to savour that delicious steak.

It is perfectly possible to support the genetic modification of crops *and* to agree that we shouldn't be growing crops to feed animals. (those are my views, at least)

I have to agree with Pacer, however, that feeding the poor is less about the amount of food and more about the amount of poverty. If the poor can't afford to pay for food, then farmers will simply grow less in the first place.

Possible it is. We have 2 tools to tackle a problem and they are not self excluding.

One of them could increase food production by, say, 20%, and for lots of valid reasons, is highly controversial. (we are not sure of possible health effects, environmental effects, socio-economic effects, etc.)

The other could increase food production by up to 80% and the only reason to not use it is human selfishness. Besides the possibility of solving global hunger, it'd help a long way in the fight against current public health problems - and expenditures - and against global warming; not to mention the benefits to the animals involved.

Furthermore, knowing that the second tool, if applied, would render the use of the first tool unnecessary, it seems pointless to waste political time and energy with the first one.

If you agree with Pacer on the point you mentioned, I'd like you to challenge the arguments I stated in my comment to his post above. Which of them do you consider invalid and why?
I really don't think farmers are deciding to produce less food for fear of not being able to sell it.
If they were organized in an OPEC-like cartel, they could do it, but I don't think that's the case.
The individual impact on prices is small, so each farmer has the incentive to produce and sell as much as possible.

"I really don't think farmers are deciding to produce less food for fear of not being able to sell it."

I think farmers in *developed* countries aren't capable of producing food cheaply enough that they could sell it en masse to developing countries (i.e the people that need the food). The cost of producing the food wouldn't be justified by what the consumers in such countries could afford to pay (in many cases, nothing).

You seem to agree with this as you say "we would need to get money in the hands of those people". But even once their purchasing power increased, they would still choose to buy the cheapest food, which would likely be stuff grown in their region, due to lower labour costs and farmer wages.

Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of time advocating the benefits of cutting out meat/animal consumption, especially from animal welfare and environmental perspectives. I'm just not yet convinced of the economics in terms of it impacting food prices.

You talk complacently about slowing population growth. Growth is growth, slowing or not, and until positive decline happens, there will continue to be problems in feeding the world. And sadly, unless non-coercive, beneficent population policies are adopted, and soon, that decline is likely to come about by starvation.

"unless non-coercive, beneficent population policies are adopted, and soon, that decline is likely to come about by starvation"

I agree, but humans aren't bright enough to make the required change. The human animal is programmed to breed and consume as much as possible, since that is what evolution required of us: just because the we are overwhelming the planet's ability to feed us doesn't mean we can just flick a switch in our heads and become superhuman....we are what we are.

But as you say, the population will be forcibly reduced when the resources run out, as it does in every unbalanced ecosystem. You have mentioned starvation. The other 'horsemen of the apocalypse' are war, disease and death.

It´s time to be real liberal about world agriculture. Rich countries should stop to subsidize their farmers even if their production is not internationally competitive. Let´s specialize each territory in the kind of agriculture and products that make them efficient and let free access to international markets. These measures should allow to cancel the hipocritical policies of help to the Third World development. Agricultural international trade would be a powerfull weapon against poverty in many countries. I don´t mean we should destroy agriculture in developed countries. It´s just that each country would keep agriculture just in those products they are really competitive and should open its market in those products they can´t produce efficiently.

What is the role of industrial scale farming? The main maize and soy exporting countries have large scale industrial farms: the US, Australia, Canada and Brazil. The huge wheat and rice yield increases of the Green Revolution were in transforming subsistence farmers into surplus farmers through better techniques. This was low hanging fruit and not expected to extrapolate linearly. The future yield gains in rice and wheat will be in shifting from small scale farms to industrial farms. This is a complicated paradigm shift since it will require the relocation of a huge surplus of agricultural workers to an urban cash economy.
The biggest potential for future crop yield improvements is Africa but that probably requires land reform from what are essentially communally owned reservations to freeholdings. This is not a simple problem to solve.

I don't have major qualms about genetically modifying foods to increase yields (minor qualms, yes). But I have major concerns about the plight of poor farmers left at the mercy of Monsanto, et al, because the GMO seed crops are programmed to produce infertile seed offspring--the so-called Death Gene. Poor farmers cannot even hold back some of the seeds from the current crop for the next planting season. See Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and other works.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the reason Monsanto et al introduced the 'death gene' in the first place was because of the complaints of Western environmentalists not wanting to see these crops spread?

"we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars [rather than on] crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world."

This is only partially true. For technical reasons, much of modern crop science has had great difficulty with producing higher yielding strains of wheat and rice, in part due to genetic complexity of those species compared to rice and soybeans. Much of the rising productivity in corn or soy is due to genetic engineering, for example, but that wheat and rice have been left behind is not due to lack of effort but due to the technical challenges of engineering their genomes. That's an uninformed cheap shot - uninformed because none of the authors have any background in plant biology.

Also worth noting that a big reason for declines in productivity is that rich-world consumers have decided they are willing to pay a premium for crops produced using lower yielding methods. It is in part a rejection of the legacy of the green revolution.

Despite the possible changes in land use in countries where population growth has plateaued or declined, it is worrying that the two fastest growing countries in the world have seen a sharp decline in their domestic food production. Will other countries step up to feed China and India, and at what price?

On another note, I noticed a few small writing details in the article that were distracting. As Grammarly CEO, Brad Hoover, has said, "Attention to detail is huge," and I wanted to point some things out. In the phrases, "They find that on between 24% and 39%. . ." and " . . . the more recent slowdown tracks in the decline in basic research. . .", there are some extra prepositions ("on" and "in", respectively). Also, neither the hyphen nor the en dash is an appropriate replacement for an em dash; see: "tartly – and accurately - that" and "soya­ - the crops".

Without looking into greater depth, it isn't immediately obvious what this article is saying. If yields are rising globally, where exactly has the growth in yields of wheat & rice gone into decline or reversal? On first guess, I would expect this to be caused by places like Germany, where over 10% of farms now produce organic food - enough wealthy consumers think lower yields are considered a price worth paying for more insects & birds.

Just raise the productivity of Ukrainian, Turkish, Russian, Ethiopian, Nigerian & Chinese farms to Dutch levels, and there would be abundant food to feed 30 billion well.

We don't necessarily need GM crops or aggressive use of pesticides - rather, we need to collect far better data, control water saturation, salinity, acidity & minerals to much higher level of precision, make efficient use of modern capital equipment in ploughing & harvesting, use polytunnels to limit evaporation in arid locations, pipe water to where it can best be used, connect well to world markets, etc.

A little more urbanisation, commercialisation of farming/ more outsourcing, removal of trade barriers & global market integration is the route to much higher productivity.

When you look at it, we are really remarkably consistent. We demonize genetic modificiation of foods, just as we demonized the working conditions if factories overseas. We ignore the fact that something needs to be done to increase yields, just as we ignore the fact that those terrible factory conditions are enormously better than the subsistance farming that is the real alternative for the people working there.

Neither of which is to say that we shouldn't want some transparency and controls when it comes to what is being done with food crops. Just as we should want conditions to improve in factories worldwide. But before we get hysterical at those who are working to increase yields, or who are employing people who are delighted at getting jobs which don't involve subsistance farming, we really ought to take a look at what the real world is like outside upper income America and Europe.

Yield growth slowdown is only to be expected. It reflects the very natural existence of genetically mandated maximal yields for any given crop; the closer you get to that maximum, the slower the increase, in an asymptotic evolution (sigmoid curve) which is the rule in biologic phenomena (think of your own growth). Expecting that more or less constant yield growth rates will result from more or less constant investment in research is nothing more than magical thinking.

Of more concern is yield decline. Many reasons could account for its occurrence, ranging from the growing trend to move from high yield to more sustainable agriculture, to irreversibly increasing germs and pests resistance. In that context, much of the current research in the giant agribusiness firms may yield short-term profit, mainly by granting competitive advantages to their users until everybody catches on, but the long-term issue remains. There is a moment when flogging a dying horse becomes flogging a dead horse.

Spectacular increases in yields occur where existing yields are poor; a green revolution is a one-time event. Banking on a second one is irresponsible at best.

Opening new land to agriculture and prioritizing its use cannot be escaped, even though it only provides respite rather than a long-term solution. Whether the prioritizing should be left to the markets is very much an open question. Up to now, unregulated access to limited or dwindling resources has not yielded very promising results.